It's not looking good. Apparently the Chronicle Herald is a union-busting paper with a horrid reputation that reprints press releases verbatim and employs scab labour. Why would they even buy us? Labour is hugely powerful in Newfoundland. They can destroy our papers easily if they go down that same route here, but they won't win.

The fundamental problem isn't union busting vs. friendly management, it's the fact that the newspaper industry is in decline because of lost ad revenue. It can't afford to pay out the salaries and benefits it used to.

It all seems kind of moot to me anyway. Few of my friends have cable and I'm probably going to get rid of it soon. And those who do have cable often have it because of American channels and content like HBO. TV in general seems like a bit of a leftover wasteland that is mostly garbage, whereas people really wanted cable in the 90's. The rise of global media provided over the internet is the bigger story.

On a related note, are there any other CraveTV subscribers out there? I just started watching What Would Sal Do?, their new comedy. The premise struck me as kind of stupid at first, but it's been pretty good so far. I've been impressed with their original programing, and I'm hopeful we'll see more cancon from all streaming services.

The fundamental problem isn't union busting vs. friendly management, it's the fact that the newspaper industry is in decline because of lost ad revenue. It can't afford to pay out the salaries and benefits it used to.

The purchase can be seen as a local Atlantic one, a presumed benefit, whereas, I believe the company was based in Quebec before. The state of the industry is no doubt most relevant, just recently there were major lay offs at Vancouver's Province and Sun. Ironically, they have money for the purchase, but not to pay their employees adequately? Business wise, the decision seems comprised of 28 potentially bad investments, but then, the Titanic was a hell of a good looking ship too.

The state of the industry is no doubt most relevant, but they apparently have money for the purchase, but not to pay their employees adequately?

What does "adequate" mean? In a free market, your market value is what somebody will pay you. If your current employer won't pay you that wage, but you can get it elsewhere, you can take that other job. If nobody wants to pay you what you demand, well, it's a made up number.

What does it say about the Herald that they were able to operate without these employees for a year and acquire other businesses during that time, assuming that's what happened?

(Not trying to be mean, but that's the market dynamic.)

Quote:

Business wise, the decision seems comprised of 28 potentially bad investments, but then, the Titanic was a hell of a good looking ship too.

Buying a declining business isn't necessarily a bad deal, so long as it isn't always losing money. I don't know enough about this business to say much either way.

Quote:

The purchase can be seen as a local Atlantic one, a presumed benefit, whereas, I believe the company was based in Quebec before.

SSP is the place where you can come to watch Newfoundlanders complain about Halifax media companies buying Quebec-owned newspapers while Ontarians post about how everything's based out of Toronto.

It's not so much that it's from Halifax. It's just their corporate culture is so different. They've clearly ruined the Chronicle Herald and I don't want that to happen here. Our main papers are currently unionized and I don't want that to change. And there's just... some businesses shouldn't be all about profit.

This Maritime satire site is being widely shared on FB right now:

‘Chronicle Herald’ pretty confident it can run 28 more papers into the ground

Quote:

“If the Irvings can do it with BNI in New Brunswick, we can do it in the rest of Atlantic Canada,” bragged Ivan Sorel, chief operating officer of The Chronicle Herald. “We’ve proven our ability to take a thriving independent publication and turn it into an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel rag."

...

“Let’s see, what else… oh yeah! We lured young journalism grads to scab for us instead of paying our experienced staff their fair, sought-after wages. Those poor grads were just trying to get their feet wet, and this pretty well destroyed their careers before they started! You think you can get a real job after scabbing? Not likely. Not to mention the union threatened to expose the scabs… scary stuff.”

We spoke with an anonymous Halifax Typographical Union member who said that if nothing else, The Chronicle Herald has demonstrated time and again that it can utterly ravage the credibility of a paper, and tear apart the fabric of the community it’s meant to represent.

“They published some very poorly researched, sensationalist stories just to sell copies,” said the source. “They got rid of bylines so no one would be accountable for the crap they printed. The newsroom went through several rounds of layoffs in the past few years; there’s no job security. I could go on and on. Advertisers either pulled out voluntarily or were threatened until they did so.

“And god knows how they’re affording to buy all these other papers. They must have been keeping a secret stash of a couple million bucks in an emergency fund. But yeah, if anyone can annihilate the reputation and viability of these other papers, it’s these guys.”

I mean, who wants that? It's got little to do with where they're from.

However, I do think Halifax-based things over-estimate the degree to which "Atlantic Canadian" is relevant or meaningful unless it is also local. They air Royale ads here ("Proudly Atlantic Canadian!") that people make fun of because we're not at all involved in any aspect of manufacturing it. And CBC's Atlantic Tonight or whatever is awful and doesn't appear to be popular in any of the provinces.

So the temptation of a Halifax-based owner to think people here want a big Regional section or whatever in their newspaper is probably a lot higher than it has been for one in Montreal. So that's the only aspect of where the owner is based that worries me.

The only good sign so far is that existing collective agreements were part of the sale, and salaries here are considerably lower than what Chronicle Herald strikers were earning.

__________________Note to self: "The plural of anecdote is not evidence."

I know it's satire, sorry - I thought I said that in my post. But that's only funny because that's their experience. It's like The Onion saying our long national nightmare of peace of prosperity is over when Bush was elected. Satire but only funny as an exaggeration of the truth. That's certainly not an article that would make sense as a joke vice versa, if was The Telegram buying the other papers. They'd probably write one about RNC officers raiding newspapers across the Maritimes to disable spellcheck, or The new owners introducing mandatory uniforms featuring bowties or something.

__________________Note to self: "The plural of anecdote is not evidence."

^ Oh, yes I saw that after, but not before my post, lol. I don't know that much about the difference between the "Chronically Horrid" and the Telegram, but often the only difference between fake news and satire is that satire has a disclaimer.

A court has finally said involuntarily hospitalizing people for their political views might not be the best thing for us to be at. I really thought this one was going to get by with no official reaction.

Climate change has caused the massive Kaskawulsh Glacier in the Yukon to retreat so much that its meltwater abruptly switched direction, in the first documented case of "river piracy" in modern times.

Instead of flowing into the Slims River and then north to the Bering Sea, the water has changed course and now flows south toward the Kaskawulsh River, the Gulf of Alaska and the Pacific Ocean, scientists have found.

Also known as stream capture, river piracy is a term used to describe a geologic phenomenon where a stream or river is diverted toward another body of water. It's usually caused by a dramatic tectonic event, such as a landslide or glacial dam collapse.

"This was the first event we could find where river piracy occurred right under our noses and due to contemporary climate change," said Dan Shugar, a geoscientist at the University of Washington Tacoma and lead author of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

I hate this goddamn commercial. Wife comes out with lame "play-cation", husband comes back with "fun screen", and she's the one that thinks he's stupid. Go lose your money while you bask in the glow of the slots and e-tables.. wtf is an E-table? a more efficient way of sucking money out of your bank account? Place smartphone here to empty wallet.

Not really an entertainment post but just reminded of Aylesbury, Saskatchewan model Elly Mayday's cross country promotional tour of Ovarian Cancer awareness month was in March since one of my friends best friends had recently passed away with ovarian cancer at 30 years of age.

The gap between human voices and computer voices is closing. A new Canadian startup called Lyrebird says it can copy anyone's voice and make them say anything.

What is Lyrebird?

It's a Canadian company that specializes in speech synthesis software. They've developed software they claim can copy anyone's voice and make it say anything.

The founders tell me if they can get a high-quality recording of you speaking for just one minute, their software can replicate your voice with very high accuracy.

If they get a recording of you speaking for five minutes, they say it would be difficult to tell the difference between your voice and their computer-generated mimic. That's where the name Lyrebrid comes from: a lyrebird is an Australian bird that's noted for its mimicry.

If anybody is looking for a fix of Canadian(ish) cinema this weekend, I can recommend "Maudie", now in general release. Fine acting and a moving story (the life of NS naive artist, Maud Lewis), one well worth knowing.